She embraced him, and then, having let go of him, she looked at him and took him again in her arms to kiss him once more, as if she had measured in herself all the love she had or could express and found that one measure was still missing. “My son,” she said, “you were far away.”b And immediately she turned away, went back into the apartment, and seated herself in the dining room that faced the street; she no longer seemed to be thinking of him nor for that matter of anything, and she even looked at him from time to time with an odd expression, as if—or so at least it seemed to him—he were now in the way, were disturbing the narrow, empty, closed universe which she circled in her solitude. What was more, once he was seated by her, she seemed on this day to be seized with some sort of anxiety, and occasionally she would glance furtively out at the street with her lovely melancholy expression, her eyes feverish until she turned to Jacques and they became peaceful.
The street was getting noisier, and the heavy red trolleys were rattling by more often. Cormery watched his mother, in her small gray blouse set off by a white collar, sitting in profile on the same uncomfortable chair []2 by the window where she had always sat, her back a bit rounded by age, but still not seeking the support of the chair, her hands clasped around a small handkerchief that now and then she would roll into a ball with her stiffened fingers, then leave in the hollow of her dress between her motionless hands, her head turned a little toward the window. She was just as she had been thirty years ago, and behind the wrinkles he once more discovered the same miraculously young face, the arch of her brows as smooth and polished as if they had been cast with the forehead, her small straight nose, the mouth still clearly delineated despite the tension at the corners of her lips from her dentures. The neck itself, which is so soon laid waste, had kept its form although the tendons were knotty and the chin a bit slack.
“You went to the hairdresser,” Jacques said.
She smiled with her look of a little girl caught in some misdeed. “Yes, you know, you were coming.” She had always been coquettish in her almost invisible way. And, as plainly as she might be dressed, Jacques did not remember ever seeing her wear anything ugly. Even now, the grays and blacks in which she dressed were well chosen. That was the way of the clan, who were always wretched, or just poor, or occasionally, in the case of certain cousins, somewhat well off. But all of them, especially the men, insisted like all Mediterraneans on white shirts and pressed pants, finding it natural that this work of upkeep—constant, given their meager wardrobes—should be added to the labor of the women, whether mothers or spouses. As for his mother,c she had always reckoned that it was not enough to wash other people’s laundry and do their housework, and as far back as he could remember, Jacques had seen her ironing the single pair of pants that he and his brother each had, until he left to go off into the world of women who neither iron nor do laundry.
“It’s the Italian,” his mother said. “The hairdresser. He does good work.”
“Yes,” said Jacques. He was going to say: “You’re very beautiful,” and he stopped himself. He had always thought that of his mother and had never dared to tell her so. It was not that he feared being rebuffed nor that he doubted such a compliment would please her. But it would have meant breaching the invisible barrier behind which for all his life he had seen her take shelter—gentle, polite, complaisant, even passive, and yet never conquered by anyone or anything, isolated by her semi-deafness, her difficulty in expressing herself, beautiful surely but virtually inaccessible, and never more so than when she was full of smiles and when his own heart most went out to her—yes, all his life she had had the same manner, fearful and submissive, yet also distant, the same look she had thirty years ago when she watched without intervening while her mother beat Jacques with a whip, she who had never touched or even really scolded her children; there was no doubt that those blows wounded her too, but she could not intervene because she was exhausted, because she could not find the words, and because of the respect she owed her mother; she had not interfered, she had endured through the long days and the years, had endured those blows for her children, just as for herself she endured the hard days of working in the service of others, washing floors on her knees, living without a man and without solace in the midst of the greasy leavings and dirty linen of other people’s lives, the long days of labor adding up one by one to a life that, by dint of being deprived of hope, had become also a life without any sort of resentment, unaware, persevering, a life resigned to all kinds of suffering, her own as well as that of others. He had never heard her complain, other than to say she was tired or that her back hurt after a big washday. He had never heard her speak ill of anyone, other than to say a sister or aunt had not been nice to her, or was “stuck up.” But on the other hand, he had seldom heard her laugh wholeheartedly.
She laughed a little more now that she was no longer working because her children were paying for all her needs. Jacques looked around the room, which had also remained unchanged. She had not wanted to leave this apartment where she had her own routines, this neighborhood where everything was easy for her, to go to a more comfortable place where everything would have become difficult for her. Yes, it was the same room. They had replaced the furniture; it was decent now, less wretched. But the pieces themselves were still bare, still pushed back against the wall.
“You’re always poking around,” his mother said.
Yes, he could not keep himself from opening the buffet, which still contained only the bare necessities, despite all his entreaties; its nakedness fascinated him. He also opened the drawers of the sideboard that housed the two or three medications with which this household made do, mixed in with two or three old newspapers, bits of string, a little cardboard box filled with odd buttons, an old identification photo. Here even the unnecessary was shabby, because they never had anything superfluous. And Jacques was well aware that had his mother been put in a standard household where objects were as plentiful as they were in his present home, she would only have made use of what was strictly necessary. He knew that in the next room, his mother’s, furnished with a small wardrobe, a narrow bed, a wooden dressing table, and a straw-bottomed chair, its one window hung with a crocheted curtain, he would find no articles at all, except, now and then, the small rolled-up handkerchief that she would leave on the bare wooden top of the dressing table.
That was just what had struck him when he first saw other households, those of his classmates at the lycée or later those of a more well-to-do world: the number of vases, bowls, statuettes, paintings that crowded those rooms. In his home, his family said “the vase that’s on the mantelpiece”; the pot, the soup dishes, and the few articles you might find had no names. At his uncle’s, on the other hand, one was made to admire the glazed earthenware from the Vosges and you ate off the Quimper dinner service. Jacques had grown up in the midst of a poverty naked as death, among things named with common nouns; it was at his uncle’s that he discovered those proper nouns. And still today, in this room with freshly washed tiles, on this plain shiny furniture, there was nothing except an Arab ashtray made of chased copper, there because he was coming, and a post office calendar on the wall. There was nothing to see here, and little to say, and that was why he knew nothing about his mother except what he learned from his own experience. Nor about his father.
“Papa?”
She looked at him, and now she was paying attention.d
“Yes.”
“His name was Henri, and what else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t he have any other name?”
“I think he did, but I don’t remember.” Suddenly distracted, she gazed at the street where the sun was now beating down with all its force.
“He looked like me?”
“Yes, he was your spitting image. He had blue eyes. And
